Summer Will Show (27 page)

“Minna! I have a proposal to make. Will you not allow me to offer your guests some supper?”

The candid pleasure at this proposal made her feel even more warmly towards the guests.

“Unfortunately, as you know, I have no money. But I have this ring, it must be worth something. Perhaps one of these gentlemen would take it to the pawn-shop for me. It is not too late for that, I hope?”

As with one voice her guests could assure her as to the closing hour of the offices of the Mont de Piété, as with one pair of legs they were ready to go on her errand. Pleasant creatures, she thought, kindly and unaffected. It was a pity that they were all so crazy, so improvident, so surely doomed to end in the jail or the gutter.

“I suppose you know, young lady,” said the bald shawled one, speaking with fatherly gruffness, “that you will make a very bad bargain over this? Diamonds are not what they were. Socially speaking, this is excellent. But for you it is unfortunate.”

Meanwhile it was being canvassed with great earnestness whose pawn-shop technique best equipped him for the errand. Strange that in a company where so many were Jews no Jewish candidate was proposed. The choice lay, it seemed, between a mouse-mannered student of engineering and the bull-fronted young man who had spoken about an artist called Blake.

The choice fell on the latter. Tying the ring into a corner of his handkerchief, and pressing the handkerchief down his boot, he remarked, “You see in me, Madame, the triumph of the Latin over the Semite. And if I may say so,” — here he bowed courteously to the mouse — “of the peasant over the Parisian.”

The writing on the wall, she supposed, had been there long enough for these affable gentry to be able to revel without as much as a glance at it; practically delighting in an unexpectedly good supper they discussed the progress of a republic which had from poverty made them poorer yet, and the only acrimonious note was struck by the bald man of the shawl (whose name, it seemed was Ingelbrecht) when the mouse disputed his prophecy that except in Paris the elections would go flat against the republic. For while the peasant, said he, thinks the best thing he can do is to work like a beast, while he would rather skulk in virtuous industry than expose himself to the danger of thinking, any republic will be of the town only and in a state of siege. Even Dury, there, was as bad a peasant as the rest of them. He laboured his canvases as though they were his fields, he asked nothing better than to paint from dawn to sundown.

“I am not ashamed of being a peasant,” said Dury pleasantly. “He is an astute animal, the peasant, and art demands a great deal of low cunning.”

Marching over the protests which this statement roused from Macgusty, Ingelbrecht turned to Sophia, “And what do you think of the peasant? You have some of your own, I understand.”

“I find them almost intolerable,” she replied.

“There, you see. She finds them almost intolerable. And so you let them die of starvation, eh, harness them in carts and send them to the poorhouse?”

In his grumpy voice with its snarling Belgian accent, in his staring angry eyes, there was considerable kindliness.

“She does nothing of the sort, I’ll swear,” interposed Minna. “She has a heart and can feel pity, she is not like you, you old humgruffin.”

“It seems to me,” said Sophia, “that if you wish to help these peasants it is fatal to pity them. Once show compassion for their misfortunes and they will persist in them to get whatever almsgiving your compassion throws. When a horse is down you beat it to get it up again, pity will never raise it.”

“Excellent, excellent!” shouted Ingelbrecht. “I wish more republicans thought like this aristocrat. But your brains are in the wrong place. They should be under a red cap instead of a fashionable bonnet. Why were you not born one of your own poachers, Mrs. Willoughby?”

“I have wished it myself.”

He continued to stare at her, growling under his breath. Though the allusion to the bonnet rankled, she liked him. Frederick had left her with her beauty unadorned to enchant the revolutionary bobtail; she would have been glad to discard that also, the bonnet and the sleek hood of flaxen hair beneath it, she would have pawned her pink fingernails along with the diamond ring. It irked her to find that even in this circle her petticoats beringed her first and foremost.

“Should there be no brains under bonnets?”

“Yes, if you please. But the woman of the future will demand to own not brains but vigour. Yes, yes, I dare say you are vigorous too. But unless you are careful your brains will step in first and tell you that it is more dignified and reasonable to remain passive.”

“I see. I will be on my guard, then.”

She was sorry when with another twinkling glare he walked off. She found him the most congenial of all her diamond’s guests; and afterwards with a certain sleeking of pride she listened to Minna’s congratulations, learning that even among revolutionaries Ingelbrecht was considered to go too far.

“He would destroy you without a moment’s compunction if you did not accept his ideas. Me too,” she added as an afterthought.

“And do you?”

“Do I? Oh, accept his ideas. I do not understand them, they are harsh and abstruse and I — alas! — can grasp only the first quality. But I know” — and her expression was one of piety — “that he has been obliged to fly from twelve European countries, and that is enough for me.”

They were standing in the middle of the room, a room made cold and oppressive by the departure of so many people. Minna took her hand and caressed it.

“Beautiful hand, so smooth and reckless. I love it better without the ring. How much did Dury bring you?”

“Enough to take me back to the Meurice. What time is it, Minna?”

Even before she heard her voice so flatly speaking them, she had known the craven falsity of those words, words only spoken because to act on them would spare her the humiliation of admitting herself compromised by Frederick’s malice. To Mrs. Frederick Willoughby of Blandamer it was one thing to stay under Madame Lemuel’s roof as a benefactress, quite another to remain there as a possible benefitee.

It was as though, shooting off what she knew to be a pop-gun, she had seen the spurting authentic answer of blood. In an instant Minna had become the desolate ghost of the Medici fountain, the resigned outcast she had bullied on that night of February; and the hand, still holding hers, became cold as death in the moment before it loosed its hold.

“You wound me,” she murmured, and fell insensible.

Even more than in sleep her face in unconsciousness became unmistakably ugly, unmistakably noble. The look of life receding from those features left the hooked nose, the florid melancholy lips, the grandiloquent sweep of the jaw from ear to chin, as time leaves the fragmentary grandeur of a forsaken temple, still rearing its gesture of arch and colonnade from drifting sand, from slowly-heaping mould. It was unbelievable that those features could ever have worn cajoling looks.

Equally baffling was Minna’s behaviour when she had been brought to. Shaking in every limb, passionately complaining of cold, she sat humped on the pink sofa, talking with deriding eloquence on any and every subject save subjects which Sophia would have discussed. She would not eat nor drink, nor go to bed, nor move nearer the fire. She would do nothing but smoke and talk.

After the second cigar, she rose to her feet, sallow and shaking.

“I see I bore you,” she said furiously.

“You do not bore me, you exasperate me. How can I attend to what you are saying when I am thinking all the time what should be done with you?”

“I have never met an English person yet,” cried Minna, “man or woman, who was not heartless. And who did not mask that heartlessness with an appearance of practical philanthropy.”

With the aim of a savage or a schoolboy she threw Sophia’s vinaigrette at Frederick’s flowers, burst into a fit of weeping, and rushed from the room. An instant after Sophia heard her being violently sick.

“Oh, how the devil,” said Sophia, speaking loudly to the echoing unhearing walls, “am I to save you now?”

A groan like a mortally stricken animal’s answered her; and kneeling on the floor, holding Minna’s body across her lap, she remembered the grotesque couples she had watched at sheep-shearings: the man crouched over his victim, working with the brutal fury of skill, the sheep sullen with terror, lying lumpish and inert under that heavy grasp, that travelling bite of steel.

The sheep lay still out of cunning. Let the grasp slacken ever so little, and it would leap away, trailing its flounce of half-severed fleece; and searching Minna’s countenance her imagination watched for some kindred sign of animal strategy, while ruthless and methodical she continued to dribble brandy over those clenched teeth, or slap those icy hands.

“If I could only warm you,” she exclaimed, measuring Minna’s weight against her own, measuring the distance from floor to bed. It was too far; but fetching the blankets and eiderdowns she padded Minna round with them, and then laid herself down alongside her in a desperate calculated caress.

It was shocking to smell on that deathly body the scent of the living Minna — the smoky perfume of her black hair, the concocted exhalation of irises lingering on the cold neck as though the real flowers were there, trapped in a sudden frost. It was spring, she remembered. In another month the irises would be coming into flower. But now it was April, the cheat month, when the deadliest frosts might fall, when snow might cover the earth, lying hard and authentic on the English acres as it lay over the wastes of Lithuania. There, in one direction, was Blandamer, familiar as a bed; and there, in another, was Lithuania, the unknown, where a Jewish child had watched the cranes fly over, had stood beside the breaking river. And here, in Paris, lay Sophia Willoughby, lying on the floor in the draughty passage-way between bedroom and dressing-closet, her body pressed against the body of her husband’s mistress.

“But is it I,
I
, who will save her,” she murmured. After a while, like a leisurely answer to those words, came the cold chiming of a church clock. Save her wherefore, save her for what?

It was three o’clock, the hour of Napoleon’s courage, the hour when people die. How much longer could she hold out? Cautiously she slid her cheek against her shoulder. There was still warmth there, she still had warmth to give. But opposing it, quite as positive, was this deadly cold she embraced, a body of ice in which, like some device at the fishmongers, a clock-heart beat, a muted tick-tock of breath stirred.

The quarter chimed, continuing the conversation between them.
Where-for?
it said on an interval of a major third. Why, indeed? Immediately, the answer was simple enough. When one finds oneself with some one at the point of death one naturally does what one can to help them. Not from liking, necessarily; not from Christian compassion, not from training, even. A more secret tie compels one in the presence of death, one falls into rank against the common enemy, exerting oneself maybe for the life of one’s worst foe in order to demonstrate a victory over that adversary ... .One’s worst foe. In the eyes of the world Minna might be exactly that; and to preserve her now, if she could preserve her, an act of idiocy, magnanimity, and destiny.

The candle was on the point of going out, shooting up a flapping flame. Cautiously she raised herself on her elbow, as though in this last allowance of sight she might surprise the answer to the church clock’s enquiry. As though she had never noticed them before she found herself absorbed in admiring Minna’s eyelashes, the only detail in her face that corroborated the suavity of her voice. From the moment I got wind of your voice, she thought, from the moment that Frederick, standing by Augusta’s death-bed, echoed those melancholy harp-notes, I have been under some extraordinary enchantment; I have hastened on, troubled, uncomprehending, and resolute from one piece of madness to another. I have thought I could have a child by the lime-kiln man, more demented still I have proposed to have a child by Frederick. I have sketched myself sailing among the islands of the South Seas with Caspar and his guitar, voyaging on the Rhine with Mrs. Hervey, disguising myself as a poacher and foraying among my own woods, dwelling meekly at the Academy Saint Gonval. I have left Blandamer as though I should never return, I have been in a street battle, I have pawned my diamond ring in order to entertain a collection of revolutionary ragamuffins. From sheer inattention I have been on the brink of a reconciliation with my husband, and as inattentively I have got myself into a position in which he seems able to cast me off. And now I am lying on the floor beside you, renewing the contact which, whenever I make it, shoots me off into some fresh fit of impassioned wool-gathering.

The candle had gone out. In the darkness Minna stirred and sighed, a rational deploring sigh of one in pain.

“What is it?”

“My head — aches.”

Now we are off again, thought Sophia, the thought exploding within her like triumph; and it was with only rather more pity than impatience for life to recommence that she asked,

“But how do you feel? Do you feel better? Let me light a candle.”

“No!”

“But, Minna, you can’t lie here on the floor.”

“I can.”

The tone was at once meek and grim. So might an animal have spoken, lying limp and leaden in its burrow.

“Well then, let me arrange you more comfortably. Let me make you a cup of tea.”

“On a spirit-lamp, like an Englishwoman in the desert.” Her teeth chattered as she spoke, her attempted laugh was broken off sharp by pain.

“Lie beside me, Sophia.”

Obediently, and with an embarrassment bred of finding herself obedient, she laid herself down, the pain in her limbs teaching her how to lie as she had lain before, finding again the scent of the irises, the smoky perfume of the loosened hair. Her mind was at war with her reposing attitude, she listened suspiciously to Minna’s breathing, and laid a caressing hand upon her wrist in order to measure the pulse-beats.

Battened down, her triumph and impatience still raged inside her, sharpening her thoughts to a feverish practicality. This must be done, the other must be done, done by her, for the time had come for her to assert herself, she must be no longer jerked hither and thither by the electrical propulsion of contact with Minna. Somehow this wildfire force must be appeased, must be granted a
raison d’être
which would release it from accident into purpose. Scurrying thus briskly, her thought suddenly lighted upon the vision of her trunk and her dressing-case, standing in the entry where Égisippe Coton had set them down. Frederick must be dealt with too.